Some Small American Downtowns Avoided Urban Renewal Mistakes

A guest editorial by Richard Kenney, AIA

I had an unusual opportunity for extensive travel this year. I teamed up with a roofing consultant to inspect a large portfolio of properties in 22 states. My portion of that work was 125 sites in Alaska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, the Dakotas, Missouri, Kansas, Washington and Oregon. Almost all the sites are lumber/hardware stores located in small towns. So my summer was all about planes, trains and automobiles. I used all three, but by far most of my travel time was spent on the highway. I was surprised to learn that I drove over 10,000 road miles! It was exhausting, but it was a remarkable opportunity to see some unbelievably beautiful countryside and some really charming small towns that I would normally never see. UrbanReviewSTL’s Steve Patterson joined me for the Missouri, Kansas and Iowa sites when the project first started.

In some ways this trip renewed my faith in the small American downtown. Recently I had been back to Shawnee, Oklahoma, where I went to high school, and I was very saddened by the condition of its downtown. When my family lived there we owned a business on Main Street, and downtown was still a great place to be (this was the mid-1980’s, not that long ago). Sears and JC Penney were still there, as well as dozens of thriving local businesses. I still remember the “Midnight Madness Sidewalk Sales” and the summer parades. But the tragic shift was well underway as I left for college in 1986. A mall was constructed on the city outskirts, and the retail epicenter shifted dramatically. It’s my understanding that “Shawnee Mall” was proud to be the first in the United States to have Wal-Mart as an actual anchor store, which seems like a sad thing indeed. Shawnee then fell the way of many American small towns, as Downtown is now a sad collection of pawn shops, payday loan offices and thrift/junque stores. It’s clear that the city has made the usual attempts to revitalize the area, including the addition of sidewalk ‘bulbs’ at intersections, planters, and benches. These new commodities stand unused near the many vacant buildings and blank storefronts with windows covered in paper. Incidentally, Wal-Mart made its usual move a few years after opening, and abandoned the mall location to build a larger super-center down the street from it.

In 1989 I lived and studied in Cologne, Germany, an old and large city that was literally 95% destroyed in World War II. Allied bombs focused on larger cities like Cologne, which lost most of their architectural legacy in the process. It’s amazing to think that
only 5% of the city fabric remained intact by war’s end. In many ways, American cities suffered the same fate, only ours was self-inflicted. In the name of post-war progress, most large American cities began to decimate their architectural legacy (which evidently is still in full swing in St. Louis). Priceless historic buildings and irreplaceable urban fabric were dismantled in the name of new highways, urban open space, “super-blocks”, convention centers, stadiums, and ‘fill in the blank here’. It really didn’t matter what the reason was, it was all considered to be disposable urban blight and a barrier to progress. My Mother lived in downtown Oklahoma City in the early 1950’s before the substantial demolition began, and it’s hard for me to imagine that it was ever as vibrant and interesting as she describes. Accordingly, it would be hard for a kid in today’s Shawnee to imagine that Shawnee’s downtown was as ever the way that I remember it was a mere 20 years ago.

If you want to see the real Germany, you see it in small towns which were typically spared the mass destruction of big cities. The same is true for the United States. The small American Downtown is our last great cultural and architectural vestige which was spared from the urban renewal war. Surviving a deadly viral infection like Wal-Mart is another issue and one that is on-going.

So now back to the summer road trips. I was concerned that I would be driving through many Shawnees: small downtowns that are bombed-out and boarded up. I was pleasantly surprised that in many northern states the small American downtown has survived beautifully. There is undoubtedly a demographic and population threshold at which Wal-Mart stays away and the local businesses thrive. But what’s truly great are the small downtowns that have managed to survive despite the existence of a Wal-Mart or a new shopping mall. There’s typically a contributing factor: perhaps they’re college towns, military towns, or towns that are close enough to a metro center to be a “boutique weekend destination” for nearby urbanites. Here are just a few of the pleasant surprises I encountered in three of my destination states.

Minnesota: Stillwater has a thriving downtown on the waterfront of Lake St. Croix.

Minnesota: Stillwater’s local businesses in wonderful original storefronts.

Wisconsin: Madison’s thriving State Street.

Wisconsin: well-utilized outdoor dining on the sidewalks of State Street.

Wisconsin: downtown Platteville (a small college town).

Wisconsin: charming and inviting original storefronts in downtown Platteville.

Wisconsin: unique retail housewares in Fort Atkinson, as can only be properly displayed in a 100+ year old basement with painted stone walls in an old downtown building.

Wisconsin: charming buildings and well-restored storefronts in downtown Sheboygan, on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Michigan: downtown Manistee, an unexpectedly thriving area which was a random stop on the way south.

Michigan: beautifully restored original storefronts in Manistee.

Michigan: fun & quirky coffee shop storefront in Petoskey.  This Petoskey coffee shop was well populated when I stopped for my Americano before hitting the road again.

What a great storefront!

Michigan: this wonderful old theater marquee in Marquette is a small work of art.

Michigan: delightful art deco storefront in Marquette.

Michigan: busy downtown coffee shop with a view of the gorgeous old City Hall across the street.

Michigan: Marquette’s City Hall

These are all small towns (with the exception of Madison, Wisconsin, which is a medium-sized city that has managed to keep its sanity nonetheless). They were fortunate enough to be in a shadow when urban renewal was blazing brightly and scorching everything in its path. These towns did not destroy themselves and their history in the name of progress. None of these towns did anything dramatic to “re-invent” themselves to compete with a mall. They didn’t bulldoze large blocks of urban fabric to create open space or parking garages. They didn’t do anything extreme or bizarre to redesign their old downtown for the 21st century (such as downtown Salina, Kansas, a story for another day). What they did was embrace what they already had, and to manage this valuable resource to keep it intact and allow it to prosper naturally. They left it alone, and the beauty and integrity of what had been built 100+ years prior returned again to provide us the texture and beauty that can’t be genuinely replicated in a new shopping environment. If you have a visitor from out of town, you don’t take them to the new Wal-Mart or to the Shop-O-Rama Factory Outlets, do you? If they ask to see your town, you take them downtown because that’s where the soul of the city resides.

There is, however, a size threshold. I had great expectations for towns like Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Unfortunately they were just large enough to have big-city ideas of re-inventing downtown, to no avail. But this is a story for another day too.

—

Richard Kenney is an Architect in Seattle Washington and the principal of Cool Green Cabin, LLC.